A TUC march in 1979 against proposed anti-abortion legislation. Photograph: Photofusion/REX

On Tuesday Angela Rayner, the newly elected Labour MP for Ashton-Under-Lyne, made her maiden speech in parliament. She spoke with passion about her experience of being a carer, of struggling to make ends meet — and of how the NHS had saved her son’s life.

“He was born at just 23 weeks’ gestation”, she said. “He clung to life for months in an intensive care unit in Manchester’s St Mary’s hospital. He finally pulled through thanks to the care of our NHS staff.”

Rayner mentioned her experience as a way of illustrating that, for her, the government’s record on the NHS was personal. But for Ann Main, the Conservative MP for St Albans, this story represented something else: an opportunity to raise the issue of lowering the time limit for abortions, which currently stands at 24 weeks.

After Rayner’s speech, Main told her that MPs might wish to remind her of her son’s survival after being born prematurely, if a debate about the abortion time limit was raised in the Commons. “I thought it was a low blow”, Rayner told me, when I spoke to her afterwards. “To score a political point like that … it wasn’t in the spirit of the way maiden speeches are normally accepted.”

That may be the case, but Main’s interjection may be in keeping with the views of many in the current government. Over the last few years, it’s been easy for feminists in the UK to be fairly complacent about abortion rights, which haven’t seemed subject to clear and present danger. But there are a number of reasons why we should be active in protecting these rights - and should actually be pushing for specific and important changes.

The first reason is the bubbling arguments in Westminster. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) recently published a document collating the voting record of government ministers on abortion, and it makes grim reading for anyone who supports a woman’s right to choose. All but five ministers voted to reduce the abortion time limit in 2008, with nine ministers voting to reduce it to 12 weeks.

Earlier this year, the Conservative backbencher and chair of the all-party parliamentary pro-life group, Fiona Bruce, attempted to introduce an amendment to the serious crime bill that would have criminalised sex-selective abortion.

Beyond Westminster, abortion rights face very serious threats on the clinical frontline. When I speak to Katherine O’Brien, public policy manager at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas), she tells me it has become routine for women to be filmed as they enter and leave clinics, accompanied by shouts of “murderer”.

Large groups congregate outside waving banners, and clinic workers have had to request police escorts when leaving for the night. The problem is now so bad that one of Bpas’s London clinics may have to close — and Bpas is seeking a change in legislation. They want the law to provide for a “buffer zone” that would enable women to access legal healthcare, free from intimidation.

So far, their efforts have proved unsuccessful. Although the police have told Bpas that under current legislation there is nothing they can do about the protests, the Home Office insists that no new legislation is needed, because harassment and intimidation is already illegal under the Public Order Act. “We’ve written to the Home Office and we’ve asked that they therefore issue the police with new guidance, but we’ve heard nothing back,” says O’Brien. She tells me Bpas also wrote to the minister for crime prevention in December and March, but their request for a meeting has been ignored, while a young woman who delivered a 100,000- strong petition to the Home Office calling for buffer zones has also heard nothing.

Although the media tends to portray the UK as a country where women can and do access abortions at the drop of a hat, the reality is somewhat different. Abortion remains a criminal offence under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which states that a woman who tries to “procure her own miscarriage” could be subject to a long prison sentence.

The reason people are generally unaware of this continued criminalisation is that the 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal in Britain, so long as specific conditions were met. These include the requirement that two doctors have to agree that a woman fulfils certain criteria before she can obtain an abortion – most often that her mental or physical health would be more damaged by continuing with the pregnancy than by ending it. The decision about whether to terminate her pregnancy is therefore not hers alone.

Polls show 62% of the British public support abortion on demand – that is, where a woman would not have to convince two doctors that her mental or physical health would be harmed by continuing with her pregnancy. Abortion on demand would mean that an adult woman is trusted to know what is best for her body.

A study released this week by Bpas further showed that half of women would consider using a once-a-month pill that would detach any fertilised egg from the lining of the womb, with only 25.6% saying they wouldn’t. While the pill is scientifically possible, if any woman in the UK were to take such a pill, she would be liable to a jail term, under that 1861 Act.

O’Brien points out that “the vast majority of people we speak to have no idea that women could go to jail in 2015 for having an abortion”.

The Offences Against the Persons Act means women’s bodies are currently governed by an archaic law passed a decade before married women had a right to own property, and half a century before women had the right to vote – let alone become MPs.

For a long time, women have kept quiet on abortion. We have not wanted to rock the boat on the infantilising 1967 Abortion Act, with its two-doctor requirement, for fear of ending up with our rights being more restricted than they already are.

But, given the routine attacks on women’s bodily autonomy, given the opportunistic way Rayner’s maiden speech was seized on by an anti-choice MP, given that our rights are under threat anyway, the time has come to be bold. We must argue strongly for two things: for abortion to be decriminalised, and for women to be granted abortion on demand.

In Canada, one of the few countries where there are no legal restrictions on abortion – where for nearly three decades abortion has not been limited by criminal law, but by the Health Act - women have not run rampant with their autonomy. In fact, abortion in Canada has steadily declined since 2000 and its abortion rate, at 14 abortions per 1,000 women, is lower than the UK’s 15.9 per 1,000 women.

Criminalising abortion does not decrease abortion rates. In fact, the evidence shows that it is generally in countries where abortion is illegal that abortion rates are highest. Women are adult human beings who are perfectly competent of deciding what happens to their bodies. It’s time the law recognised that.